Meet our latest debut author, whose novel has been described as: “A coming of age story where the threat of violence shimmers like a heat haze.” A book about grief and family that is soaked in the folk horror of the British landscape.
Tell us a little about your book and how you came to write it.
Set during the heatwave of 1976, Water Shall Refuse Them tells the story of sixteen-year-old Nif, whose family is on the verge of imploding following the accidental death of her little sister. They go to stay in a cottage in an isolated Welsh village in order to escape their grief, where Nif meets Mally, a charismatic teenaged boy. Nif has invented her own belief system, the Creed, in order to help her come to terms with her sister’s death, and the book follows her over the course of a few weeks during that sweltering summer, as she discovers a great deal about herself, and digs up some ancient secrets about the village.
I wrote Water Shall Refuse Them as the dissertation for my MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. I embarked on the course as I had an idea for a novel, but felt I needed the added motivation that would be provided by following a structured course. In the end, it worked, and I learnt an enormous amount along the way. I entered my novel for a couple of competitions after I had submitted it for my MA, and it ended up being shortlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition, and longlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award. This gave me the confidence to submit it to publishers and agents, and helped, I’m sure, to get the attention of Dead Ink when I mentioned it in my cover letter.
What makes your book unique?
Nif is a strong female narrator who is also flawed. She may or may not be an unreliable narrator, I couldn’t possibly comment. The setting of a rural community during the heatwave of 1976 is also pretty unusual, especially in recent books. I think these two things combined make it unique. When I first came up with the idea for Water Shall Refuse Them, a heatwave seemed like an unusual, yet extremely fitting backdrop for a folk horror story. I was keen to examine how people respond to their environment when they have no control over it, and the unwavering oppression of a drought seemed like a fitting device to put pressure on my characters and see how they’d react. The characters in my book all have their own personal demons, and the environmental circumstances put further pressure on them and exacerbates their torment.
Your book will soon be in readers’ hands. Which part of being published are you most excited about?
I think it will be getting my hands on the final printed copies. We produced proofs which were sent out to reviewers and bookshops, but the final copies, with the shiny cover and fancy paper stock, are when it will finally seem real. I’m also excited about getting out to bookshops and meeting readers and booksellers, and doing events and readings (I have three children, so a captive audience that doesn’t heckle is not to be sniffed at).
What has been the most challenging part of your journey to publication?
At the risk of sounding trite, it was writing the book in the first place. It was a long and arduous journey, with numerous false starts and rewrites, and, by not plotting it out properly beforehand, I found that I would write myself down rabbit holes, without knowing how I was going to get out again. In terms of obtaining a publishing deal, I was much more fortunate than many other debut writers, in that I didn’t spend years accumulating rejection letters. I sent my manuscript out to a handful of agents and small publishers, and accrued a few form rejections, but was mostly just met with silence. I’d researched independent publishers, as they appealed to me: I think for a debut author the proximity to the coal face was attractive, as opposed to the several layers of hierarchical remove you have with one of the big publishers. I’d had my eye on Dead Ink for a while. When they finally opened for submissions, I sent them my first three chapters straightaway, and was lucky that they were keen to see the full manuscript. The offer of publication came soon after that.
Do you have a writing mentor, or someone who has influenced your work?
The closest I have had to a mentor is Nicholas Royle, who was incredibly helpful as my supervisor on the MA. Nick is a renowned writer and translator of novels and short stories, and has been hugely supportive of my own writing over the last few years. He runs Nightjar Press, which published one of my short stories as a limited edition chapbook earlier this year, and I learnt a great deal from him while we were working on the line edits. As editor of Salt’s Best British Short Stories series, he has selected one of my stories for inclusion in this year’s edition, which is very exciting. As well as being a talented writer, editor and translator, Nick is also an accomplished Cossack dancer.
If there was one book that you could have written, other than your own, what would it be and why?
One of my favourite books, and which was a big inspiration for me when I was writing Water Shall Refuse Them, is The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. He was a prolific and brilliant writer, and by all accounts, a kind and funny man. I was struggling with the umpteenth rewrite of my book when I decided to re-read The Wasp Factory, and it reinforced how crucial the narrator’s voice is to the tone of a novel, and that was something I worked especially hard on in the subsequent drafts. As a result, I’ve grown very fond of Nif, despite her flaws. In the preface to the latest edition of his book, Banks says: ‘Children probably harbour quite as many violent thoughts as adults, they just don’t usually possess a sophisticated moral framework within which to place them.’ This is as true of Nif as it is of Frank, Banks’s narrator. I like to think they’d get on.
What advice would you give to other writers hoping to publish a novel?
From my own limited experience, I would say don’t follow the crowd. Try to find something unique about your book, something that other writers don’t have. The best books are the ones that are themselves, that don’t try to fit into a mould created by other writers. I don’t mean that you have to break away from the genre you’re writing in, but try to perceive the originality in the genre and create something unique, rather than writing to a formula.
Is there a debut novel you’re particularly looking forward to reading in 2019?
My friend Michael Walters has his book, The Complex, out with Salt Publishing in August. Michael and I were on the MA course together, and I was lucky enough to read an early draft of The Complex. It’s an unusual and brilliant book—an instant classic I would say—and difficult to categorise. The author himself describes it as being about ‘a creepy family holiday, told from three different points-of-view, and set in an alternative near-future. It’s a literary-psychological thriller-sci-fi-drama-romance-horror.’ With that kind of blurb, I can’t wait to read the final version.
About the author
Lucie McKnight Hardy grew up in West Wales, and is a Welsh speaker. She has also lived in Liverpool, Cardiff, Zurich and Bradford, and has now settled in Herefordshire with her family. She studied English at the University of Liverpool, and has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University.
Water Shall Refuse Them is published by Dead Ink on 4 July 2019, get your copy here.
Follow Lucy on Twitter or visit her website to find out more.